


each soul journeys alone

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Intimacy, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Porn with Feelings, Post-Episode: s02e20 Beside Still Water, Reconciliation Sex, Romance, Slow Burn But As In 9 500 Words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 10:50:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12011169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: Magnus and Alec take the long way home, but get there in the end.Or, Renaissance geniuses, night rain, hand-kissing, duty and love, the Brooklyn Bridge, quiet revolution, and Alec giving Magnus everything he deserves.





	each soul journeys alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [electricshoebox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricshoebox/gifts).



> For Riss, who deserves the world.
> 
> 1) Hello, new fandom! Let me add to the pile of post-finale fic.  
> 2) I fudged Magnus's birthdate a bit, but show canon doesn't lay it out explicitly.  
> 3) What even is the show canon status of Magnus's cats? I ended up playing fast and loose there.
> 
> What you'll find here: spoilers for the season 2 finale, a lot of feelings, and a heap of sentimental sex. Take your time; this is a slow story.

*

  
_There's a cold heart, buried beneath,_  
_and warm blood, running deep_  
_Secrets are mine to keep_  
_protected by silent sleep_  
_I'm not ready, I'm not ready_  
_for the weight of us, for the weight of us_

— Sanders Bohlke  
  


They'd strolled a block or two from the Hunter's Moon when Alec said, apropos of very little, "Tell me about Michelangelo."

It wasn't precisely how he'd planned to open the conversation. They walked along quietening streets in something akin to companionable silence, broadly pointed toward Brooklyn. Magnus hadn't offered to make a portal; Alec hadn't asked him to. The puddles of a recent downpour blurred the neon signs of shopfronts and eateries into watery calligraphies in unknown alphabets. The air tasted of wet asphalt.

Next to him, Magnus laughed, a snippet of mirth. "A dear old friend. What brought this on?"

"So _that_ was true? Because I know you didn't see the Dead Sea form. That took a geological timescale."

"I get the feeling my integrity is being questioned."

"No." Alec's throat tightened despite the lightness of their words, skating on the edge of amusement. His nerves were still ready to jangle at the slightest provocation. "I'm just curious."

He could've chosen a dozen other topics, all more acute than a throwaway comment from Magnus months ago. Maybe he just missed the ebb and flow of untroubled conversation between them.

"Far be it from me not to humor you." Magnus's shoulders quirked. So did his mouth.

His wrist brushed against Alec's as Alec swerved around a pond in the cracked sidewalk, lit with backwards letters in dazzling green. On a corner ahead, three women giggled, leaning into each other in either drunkenness or casual comfort. Maybe both.

"You can't have been that old, can you? Michelangelo died in 1564."

" _Alexander_ ," Magnus said, with evident delight. The tight feeling changed shape: an hour ago Alec hadn't known if he'd ever hear his name spoken like that again. "You've done research."

"Hey. I know how to google."

"A surprisingly productive use of mundane invention." Glancing at the orange crosswalk signal, then the empty street, Magnus sauntered across. A pensive undertone tinged his voice. "It was my first time in Europe, before it even called itself that. You're right; I was more or less your age. Not yet in the maturity of my powers."

Alec thought of what few Renaissance paintings he'd seen: rich color, powdery light, religious figures in brushstrokes cracked finely by age. Magnus had walked in the dust of the same streets as those painters.

"He was older than me by decades. Already a legend, a maestro. Somebody was writing his biography."

"They did that back then?" The Clave kept terse records of Shadowhunter lives in the archives in Idris. Alec hadn't given it much consideration. His entry was probably still indented under his parents'. _Eldest child of Robert and Maryse Lightwood_ ; the date of his rune ceremony; the day he and Jace took the oath and received the parabatai rune.

"Certainly," said Magnus, "if you were enough of a somebody." He twirled a hand. His rings scattered the amber of a streetlight overhead. "I met Michelangelo in Rome. He'd been commissioned to finish the construction of St. Peter's Basilica. I was fascinated—and catching his eye was no great chore."

"Sure, tell me how you conquered a Renaissance genius, I'll just—" Alec bit his lip. "Sorry. I did ask." He'd asked so he'd have a little time to broach the unsaid things crowded close between them.

Magnus nodded, and Alec tried not to read too much significance in his frown. Then Magnus veered away, as much as the tacit lockstep of their progress allowed, and his eyes went to the murky display window of a souvenir store. "We did share a bed. One of the first times I did that with a man. That was the very least of it, Alexander."

"I'm not jealous. I mean—maybe I did—think of you with other people when we were—" Would it be worse to go on or shut his mouth forever about now?

Magnus took the decision out of Alec's hands by turning back. His face was arrestingly, studiously still.

"When we broke up," Alec finished. "I had to. If I didn't want you to be alone."

"Think of me with somebody else," Magnus said in flawed echo of him.

Alec set his chin, the angles of his body falling into a soldier's stance. The few hours of rest they'd had since Lake Lyn seemed laughably not enough for this. "Yeah. You deserve to be loved. That's probably weird for me to say."

Magnus's mouth parted on a sigh. He put a hand on Alec's arm, canted back across his side as he'd grasped his own wrist behind his back. "Forgive me if I don't take it that way."

His hand spread a disproportionate flush of heat through the leather of Alec's jacket. Before the silence could pool too deep, Alec said, "Tell me the rest?"

"Yeah. Let's walk while I talk, though."

It wasn't quite coming on midnight yet, but a chill layered itself in between the buildings and dripped off the trees of a park they passed in tiny, icy kisses on their skin. Metal clanked as a yawning young man hauled down the rolling shutter over a restaurant window, the open door allowing a last waft of spices and roasted vegetables into the night air.

"I spent two years in Rome. Studied Latin, debated philosophy, attended some marvelous parties. Maestro Buonarroti was a man of faith, not one for decadent diversions. I'd often visit him when he was done painting for the day."

"In St. Peter's?"

"He was working on the Pauline Chapel at the time. Those were his last paintings."

Alec tried to picture Magnus in period clothes like those in his scarce mental images: a velvet cap, a slashed-sleeved doublet, his agile fingers heavy with jeweled rings. It didn't quite fit, even though he'd seen the paintings and grainy photos of Magnus through various eras, collected by Clave intelligence.

"It sounds—wow."

"Not quite real," Magnus offered.

"I guess. I can hear it's true. Your voice goes a little soft when you're remembering. Like—I'm not gonna imitate you. It just does."

"Okay." Magnus sounded half pleased that Alec had caught him. Spinning a quarter on his heel, he took a new street at the next junction. Block by block the buildings grew steeper around them.

"I was very fond of him. After I left Rome, I wrote to him for years. Somehow his replies always found me, sometimes after months on the way." Magnus's shoulders flexed, his fingers repeating the motion. "Until I realised it'd been well over a year since the last one."

That at last made Alec take his hand: a press of wind-chilled palms together, Magnus's rings still colder. Alec slid his thumb over Magnus's, several slow times.

"I went back to see St. Peter's, sometime in the 1590s. Stood where I'd seen him standing with his sketches and instruments. The basilica was finished by then. I thought I could see the mark of his hand in all that beauty."

They stopped to wait at a crossing, the cars humming by too densely for a spot of jaywalking.

"I'm glad you had that." Fighting the desire to hold Magnus closer, to try and bury his melancholia in useless human warmth, Alec squeezed his hand. Magnus made a noise of acquiescence, returning the gesture. As the light changed, they hurried along the brief crowd on the crosswalk.

It came to Alec with a delay of long seconds that despite the late hour and the relative anonymity granted by it, they were in public. He couldn't bring himself to care.

The sidewalk carried them on through a few spatters of rain that never became another shower, and then the flooding smell of damp trees from another streetside park. Their brown branches split into swaying webs of shadows on the asphalt.

"I've loved many people," Magnus said, breaking the silence. "That Renaissance genius was only one of the first."

His fingers fretted in Alec's grip, and Alec let the handhold slide free. He didn't know the rules anymore, if he ever had. He didn't know if his heart was big enough for the answer he wanted to give.

"I know you wouldn't be _alone_ , even without me. You have people who care about you." Catarina, Raphael, Luke, Dot, and so many others—Magnus was surrounded by people he'd forged into family. Alec's breath shivered, and it wasn't all because of the rising wind, slithering under his jacket.

"I do. One needs friends. I don't hold many truths as absolute, but that comes close." Magnus picked up his steps by a margin. The words scattered from him like little cloudy pearls. "Life would be a dull affair without anybody who will, oh, dance with you until dawn. Break out the good whiskey when you've dashed your heart to pieces at the feet of some beautiful cad who'll never love you. And, yes, slap you out of your worst bad ideas."

"Sure." Alec found a grin at that, before his own voice softened. "I've always had Jace and Izzy for that. Except the heartbreak whiskey, I guess."

"I hoped that you did." A quicksilver clench in Magnus's jaw belied his smooth tone.

"Izzy was..." Reluctantly Alec let the last week slip to the forefront of his mind. "She was a lifesaver. I'm barely exaggerating."

The recent days had been a mess at the Institute: everyone on high alert, intelligence flying to his desk faster than he could get through it, his baby brother still in the infirmary. Izzy had left him new mugs of coffee alongside the latest reports, shooed him to bed on more than one night, and, once, pulled him from his chair and hugged him for a long minute. He'd only realised afterward that his cheeks were damp.

_What would I do without you_ , he'd said, not even a question, when she went to the door.

_Perish_ , she said sweetly, and that dragged a wan laugh from him.

In the present, Magnus gave a fledgling chuckle, too hoarse to be in any way happy. The pale lamps of the Brooklyn Bridge shone through the mist that refused to quite fall. It sieved the lights into ghostly silver haloes in the air.

"And", Alec said, "Jace is kinda shit at feelings, but maybe you should know how narrowly you avoided him coming to kick in your door."

"There's a sobering image."

"We were all pretty busy with the end of the world, though." Alec held his blink for a breath, then opened his eyes. Cracking this lid brought a broil of thoughts to the surface, thoughts he'd been careful to make sink.

"It wouldn't be the first time I was saved by a greater calamity." 

"That, and I told him you could just knock him down the stairs with a flick of the wrist."

A thin thread of humour spun in both their tones. Alec didn't have to look at Magnus to pin down the more somber knowledge they shared. They'd been yanked back from the crumbling brink of devastation by Clary and Jace's desperate stand against Valentine.

The bridge and the ramps coiling up to the near end of it loomed closer. The swoosh and zip of vehicles across its span was muted by the fog. This close, the bridge was a colossus, half shadow, half material, and a deeper darkness pooled at its foot. If mundane stories populated the undersides of bridges with monsters—well, Alec would roll his eyes, but a shiver snaked down his spine anyway. He was glad to reach the better illumination at the light traffic walkway.

They walked a moment. At the far end was the subway station, and if Alec didn't turn back there, on whatever excuse of having walked Magnus home...

_What do you say we get out of here?_ Yes, but to go where, exactly?

"What I said back in the alley—" Alec began. Tension prickled at him again. Beside him, Magnus's gait slowed, and Alec halted in response.

"Second thoughts?"

God. There was Magnus going opaque again. They could banter and laugh, steal little touches, but how much of that was just the gloss of relief over unresolved issues?

"No. Look." He felt the moment like his feet leaving the edge of a roof, trusting the right rune to cushion his fall. "I'll survive you. I promise."

Magnus inhaled, raw and sudden; Alec had punched through his raised guard.

"I—I just don't want to." A sustained leap of faith, all of it. "I almost lost Max, Jace and you in less than a week." _So that was a little much, and I'm still working through it, and I couldn't bear to just let you go._

His hand steady at the back of Alec's neck, Magnus tipped his face down. Stifling a gasp, Alec let him draw them brow to brow, held still and attentive by that measured gesture.

"It's easy to wish that a calamity would just wipe away the smaller problems. At least it usually has a way of putting them in perspective."

"Yeah, I've noticed." Alec curled his fingers into the fabric of Magnus's jacket, above his heart. They'd kissed in the alley. That moment of blissful relief still felt conditional.

"Neither of us only belong to ourselves," Magnus said, soft. "These titles we've accepted, they come with a cost."

Alec swallowed. "More like a duty. 'Cost' sounds like it's all a sacrifice. I've seen you with the warlocks. It gives you something, being the one to watch over them."

"Trust a Shadowhunter to rhapsodize about the glories of responsibility."

"You wouldn't give it up." The cloth chafed under Alec's fingers as he spread them out. "I don't think I'd love you like I do if you would."

Magnus's laughter was hushed, but it eased the heaviness in the air. The kind of laugh that he might press against Alec's mouth in a fond moment. They stood too close for him to even see Magnus's expression clearly.

"Besides, I can't really give up the Institute either. They might send us somebody like Aldertree again. I—I haven't been doing such a stellar job, the Seelie Queen was right about that, but—"

"Alexander," Magnus cut in, with patience that implied some sage insight would follow.

Alec's insight might've lacked in sagacity, but it was his, hard-won. "We were _talking_ , Magnus. Werewolves, warlocks, Shadowhunters at the same table. If I quit the first time I mess it up, we'll just go back to the old suspicions."

"Those suspicions are a deep-worn rut." Stepping back—Alec relinquished the contact with a pang of longing—Magnus smiled at him, wry but not unmerry. "You're settling yourself in for a very long haul."

"Is that your official opinion as a leader of the Downworld, Mr. Bane?"

"Mr. Lightwood has implied that he values my opinion."

Alec stuffed his fidgety hands in his pockets, caught in the gravity of Magnus's good cheer. "It's a work in progress. I'd be pretty stupid not to listen to somebody that's seen centuries of Shadow World life."

Magnus's shoulder nudged his; they moved on. Now and then someone passed them, hunkered against the wind whistling in the bridge cables and structures.

"Every era has had its fighters for the cause," Magnus said after a spell of walking. "When I was first in Rome, they hung men who loved other men in the city plazas. Two hundred years later I was in France, and they were writing pamphlets on how all willing love was good and right."

Alec relaxed his jaw with a conscious effort, reminding himself not to step in the way of Magnus's point, even though his choice of example seemed to twist Alec's windpipe. "Thinking of old friends?"

"Many old friends. And all the fates the world's devised for whoever it considered an outsider at any given time."

"You think I can't do it?" The question slipped out before Alec could think better.

"Change the world?"

"Make a _difference_." Alec stopped himself from stomping. The aged, damp-spattered planks of the walkway creaked faintly under their shoes. The lights of a car blinked up through the gaps in the planking as it zoomed past below.

"I think the Clave's on rough waters. The Consul was a Circle member, and some part of the Idris army was—is—loyal to him." Magnus's mouth flattened. "It's going to storm on all of us."

Hope and fear leapt up in Alec in the same singular surge. He tracked the lines of the heavy suspension cables skyward instead of looking at Magnus. "I know this is bigger than me, or the Institute, or one city. The Clave fights change tooth and nail, just on principle."

"Those pamphlets I mentioned," Magnus said by Alec's shoulder. "They began on someone's desk. There was one person that said, we should think about this another way. It'll be hard, but it doesn't have to stay like this."

"And if they had a few good people on their side—"

"They might, with enough effort, make a real difference." The flickering humor was gone from Magnus's voice, and it was left soft in a way that pressed into Alec's chest. He set his hands on the walkway railing, stepping aside as a fellow pedestrian strode by them, coat-tails flapping. Neither of them had bothered with a glamour for the way home. To the loft.

"About that," he said. Magnus's heels tapped a half-circle around Alec as he joined him, an arm's length to his left, facing the dark-flowing estuary and the light-speckled Brooklyn shoreline mirrored in it. "About us."

"The two of us, as opposed to us and our people?"

"That too." It would've been so much easier to sweep aside everything but that. "Valentine's dead. Jonathan's dead. I don't know what the Seelies plan, but I hope the rest of the Shadow World is headed back to some common ground."

"I believe so." Magnus rapped his fingernails on the railing in an arrhythmic patter.

"I'll do everything I can to keep it that way." Magnus had taught him to think outside the limitations of custom and tradition. He had to keep pushing at them. "But there's gonna be new crises. We might—Magnus, I _want_ a world where this works out. Shadowhunters and Downworlders working together. You pretty much said it could take longer than a human lifetime."

_Longer than I'll live._ He rushed to continue, aware that he'd brushed by a topic so fragile and sore they'd never truly raised it yet. Now was not the time. "Our people might end up on opposite sides again."

A small voice that sounded dangerously like Izzy said, _You've had him back for like an hour, and this seemed like a good time to talk about a hypothetical war. Good going, Alec._

"Then we'll have a choice." Magnus canted his head as if chasing some near-invisible sight in the cloud-weighed sky. It smelled like rain, a chilly, fresh note laid over the gas and asphalt smell of the city. "Join them, or show them another way."

Alec's breath caught. He managed a hum that meant, _go on_.

"I can't ask you to abandon the people you love any more than you could ask me." Magnus turned, the wind snatching at his hair. "The only option I see is to stay by your side and convince the rest of them."

"Oh," Alec muttered, and then he couldn't find another word for a good few seconds.

Magnus's hand was dry and cool in his own, fingers half-bent against his palm as he bowed to lay a careful, wondering kiss on the back of it. A breath escaped Magnus, and Alec felt his fingers tremble. Barely raising his head, he sought Magnus's eye. He hoped he was worthy of that faith.

"I better do the same then." The ambient noise of the traffic below nearly drowned out his words. "I don't think I was ready for this. For you and me, together. I leaped in headfirst and—no, let me finish."

Magnus gave a nod. His narrowed gaze stayed on Alec, as Alec mustered himself to continue. "It worked sometimes. But things like the Soul-Sword, it's different. You don't need me to protect you. Not like I'm used to."

"The burden of the firstborn." Something seemed lodged in Magnus's breezy tone. He let his hand rest in Alec's.

"You've seen the amount of trouble Jace gets in all by himself. Throw in Izzy and Max... that's beside the point, though."

"Are you suggesting you never stray from the straight and narrow?"

"Well, somebody's been a bad influence." Alec fought back laughter.

When Magnus guffawed rather inelegantly, Alec lost that particular engagement. The wind carried the sound of their merriment out over the water, and his heart eased by another small notch. How big a difference it could make that he'd gone a week without hearing Magnus laugh.

Then Magnus curved his free hand under Alec's, clasping it in both of his own. Startled out of his reverie, Alec blinked at him. Every gesture between them felt overloaded with meaning.

"I do need you, Alexander." Magnus's upturned face shifted at the edges of his mouth, at the corners of his eyes, with wordless feeling. "Not to defend me, maybe, but to remind me."

"Of what?"

"That I unbuilt my walls for a reason." Seemingly without thought, Magnus circled the pad of his thumb over Alec's palm. "Because you were worth it. Then I thought I had to give you up, and I retreated behind them again." His jaw worked, and Alec thought he might look away. "I was harsh with you. Too much so."

"Hey. If I don't get to apologize, then neither do you." Alec's voice came out too thick. "It hurt, I'm not gonna lie. But I do get it."

This could probably be filed under things he'd never have admitted to anyone else. Even when Izzy had soothed his heartbreak, he hadn't really confided in her. Jace knew the way Jace knew; Alec hadn't been ready for words, and they weren't truly needed. It'd have been impossible to bare himself so knowingly. _I do need you._

"We've discussed this self-sacrificing streak of yours."

"Pot, kettle, black," Alec shot back. "You've had the world on your shoulders for too long. I didn't exactly make it easier." Jittery warmth thrummed along his skin as he spoke.

"I suppose being apart forced us both to think." Magnus's eyes were dark and still fixed on Alec's face. In another moment it'd have thrown him, the odd sincerity of it, in contrast to Magnus's usual frothy quality.

"I just," Alec said before his mettle deserted him. "Sometimes you seem like you have all the answers. Like you can't get hurt."

"I'm immortal, not omniscient, though I've benefited from playing the part."

"That's what I'm trying to say. I screw it up half the time, but I want to be there for you. Have your back. That's a thing I should do, as a—"

"Partner?" Magnus arched a brow.

"I was gonna say 'boyfriend'." A flush raced up his cheeks, though the cold streetlights probably bleached it into invisibility. "Not sure I made a great case for myself."

"Well." Magnus touched his knuckles to Alec's jaw. "That honesty just might get you everywhere."

The rasp in his voice, the tenderness of his fingers, brought Alec short. Magnus could make him weak in the knees with a laugh or a look, but this was something else: a slow tide of comfort that'd crept in without him noticing.

"C'mere." Alec didn't need to reach far. Magnus stepped into his arms. Exhaling against the mist-dappled shoulder of Magnus's jacket, Alec drew him in and held him close, and Magnus wrapped his own arms firmly around Alec in return. They could've been alone on the bridge, cocooned in a small, secluded universe.

Alec rubbed an open hand over Magnus's upper back, an idle, indulgent motion. If he did go back to the Institute now, if they needed to take the reconciliation step by step, at least he'd got out most of what he needed to say. The protocol seemed rickety, but Magnus leaned into him and all Alec felt was calm and grateful.

Two things happened.

Magnus said, "I want to take you home."

His heart pounding, Alec glanced at Magnus, and then the first rush of the impending downpour came drumming down upon the walkway. It was a hard, frigid rain, matting Alec's hair to his scalp and making a game try at the same with Magnus.

_Yes_ , Alec had meant to say, _Yes a hundred times._

"You wanna run for it?"

"I have a better idea." Magnus had his right hand raised to the side, fingers poised to be snapped, though the gesture lacked his habitual easy verve.

"What about that magic depletion?" It was a sprint of several blocks to the loft. Alec's jacket collar was busily soaking through.

"Magic is a renewable resource. You're a worse worrywart than I remember." Blue flashed around Magnus's hand, making a shimmering halo of the rain around them as the droplets refracted the glow.

"Okay." Not interested in prolonging the argument, Alec braced a hand on the small of Magnus's back and stepped into the liquid swirl of the portal.

The rain cut off; his insides tugged sideways at the seam of _here_ and _there_ ; and they stood just inside the front door of the loft. Water from their shoes oozed onto the floor.

"You, uh, didn't throw out all my clothes, did you?" Alec had left a modest sample of his wardrobe occupying a corner of the walk-in closet.

Magnus looked bemused, then amused. "I—didn't get around to it." He _tsk_ ed at the formed puddles as if that'd conceal that he sounded winded.

"Good." Alec crouched to fight with the damp laces of his combat boots.

"I could snap my fingers again." Magnus shrugged out of his jacket, inspecting it critically. A runnel of rainwater trickled down his cheek. Alec's throat worked a couple of times.

"No more magic tonight. Rift closed, heroics all done, right?"

"Yes sir," Magnus retorted at Alec's pointing finger, with a half-playful cant of his head. "Something hot to drink, though. I won't have you catch cold just when I've managed to steal you away."

A heat poured through Alec that could just about have made Magnus's preventive remedies redundant. Not trusting his tongue, he nodded.

They busied themselves with getting dry, moving around the loft and each other in familiar loops and turns. Alec towelled his hair best as he could and dug out a new shirt. The cats trotted out from their napping spots, and the Chairman declared his displeasure at Alec's absence by curling into a possessive loaf on top of his boots. Church, more stately in his seniority, merely trailed Magnus into the kitchen.

"I'm sorry." Going to one knee, Alec held out a finger to the Chairman until the cat deigned to push his downy cheek against it.

As per an old compact, he took the opportunity to text his whereabouts to Izzy and Jace. The three of them weren't the inseparable unit they used to be—he might have to admit to Clary sneaking in to make four—but it was ritual by now.

_Ok, buddy_ , Jace returned almost right away. _Good to hear it._ Alec could tell his brother was keeping a small distance, their bond purposefully quiet, but if the scene he, Izzy and Magnus had interrupted at Lake Lyn was any clue, Jace was in good hands, and had plans that warranted some privacy.

So did Alec, maybe.

The loft wrapped him in its familiar smells: the ink and leather of old books, an undercurrent of woodsmoke and brick dust, and the undefinable sweet vestige of Magnus working his spells. Alec had given up on figuring out a comparison. A forgotten sheaf of roses had littered the coffee table with papery petals.

Izzy replied to his report with a string of multicolored hearts followed by a miniature eggplant pointed at an angle, three drops of water, and a starry-eyed face. Alec stared for a second, then understanding dawned. He made a noise. It was not a dignified one.

_Gross, Iz,_ he tapped out. _Love you too._

_I'm pure as the driven snow!_ She was not, that much he could tell even with half of Manhattan and a slice of Brooklyn in between them. _I'm just here hearing about phytoplankton since Simon ditched his date. Be good, big brother._

"What was that?" A cabinet door thudded shut in the kitchen.

"Izzy says hi." Hoping his ears weren't too red, Alec silenced the phone. If there was an Institute general alert, it'd override silent mode, but he'd be damned if he was disturbed for anything less. "Need a hand with anything?"

The gas stove whispered with a narrow ring of blue flame under a steaming saucepan of milk. What looked like half of Magnus's pantry of spices sat on the counter, next to a taller than average clutter of dishes. Little signs of preoccupation. Magnus was usually more diligent with his space, especially since he only had to wave a hand for cleaning. He was balanced on his toes to reach something on the top shelf.

"The nutmeg, if you please, since I'm not allowed to summon it down."

Alec and his crucial four inches of extra height obliged him. "Since when has me worrying stopped you? I never would've known." It didn't come out as lightly as he'd meant.

"You worrying has changed quite a few things, Alexander." Magnus sidled past him to the stove. "One cinnamon stick and a pinch of red pepper into the pot."

Alec snapped a cinnamon stick in two and mulled over Magnus's reply as the hot chocolate simmered. What idea did he even have about Magnus's true limits? How often did Magnus rein himself in for Alec's benefit—and that was where the question shifted. He let himself be tasked with hunting for clean mugs instead.

As a rule, hot chocolate wasn't to Alec's tastes, but Magnus made it with a cherished old-time recipe that gave it enough bite: proper bitter chocolate and nine kinds of spices, plus one procured from his cupboard of potion ingredients. It nearly scalded Alec's tongue on the first sip, but the warmth banished the last of the rain chill.

Magnus sat down on the couch with a flop as devoid of melodrama as Alec had ever seen him perform. Exhaustion rather than calculation guided it. Even so, his mug remained flawlessly upright through this.

"Long day."

"A good one, I'd say."

"I liked the part where the world didn't end." Pulling a socked foot up onto the couch, Alec hooked the ankle behind his other one.

"Still a master of the understatement." Magnus drank testingly, and Alec peered at the foot-wide expanse of couch between them.

"'Still'. It was a few days. I'm not that different from the last time you saw me. Like actually saw me, if we ignore the whole demon-fighting, rift-sealing thing."

"That's debatable." Magnus laid his right hand on Alec's out-turned knee. The same hand Alec had bent to kiss on the bridge. "Time always passes, but we don't always move through it at the same pace. Ah, that's more elegant in the original."

"Hope it's at least a good different." Alec hid behind his mug for a pondering swallow. Every sense told him he could relax here. His thigh holster with his stele and seraph blade was hung on the coat rack. The floor lamp across the coffee table cast a shell of gold in the middle of the room, shunting the twilight into the corners, and outside gusts of rain sluiced down the tall windows. Magnus, his hair mildly mussed from the downpour, eyes flickering half-closed and open again, had shed most of his layers save for this languid, candid one that Alec had thought he'd lost for good.

"You're here," Magnus said, and maybe that was an answer.

"Yeah." For the first time tonight, the space between them felt utterly open. Alec pushed his mostly empty mug onto the table.

When he took Magnus's hand from his knee, Magnus held a breath; Alec lifted it to his lips and tasted a honeyed dreg of nightwort in the hollow of the palm. Desire slid tarry and heady into the pit of his stomach, a match short of a flash fire.

It wasn't late in arriving: like the two of them, it'd taken its time. With an open-mouthed kiss to the heel of Magnus's hand, Alec made him suck down a startled sound.

China grated against the tabletop as Magnus liberated his other hand. "Alec."

It rang different than his full name, weighed and a little fragile. _Don't go now. Don't pull back._ Fuck, he'd have to understand, and yet hope beat too loud in his ears.

Then Magnus climbed slantwise into his lap and kissed him. There was nothing hasty to it, a well-laid plan unfolding as intended; Alec went pliant at the contact, his voice caving into a gasp as he tipped his head back into Magnus's hands. Magnus bit his lower lip with enough pressure to pull another noise from him.

Alec smothered that one against Magnus's mouth in a second, hungrier kiss. He draped his arms loosely around Magnus's neck, wrists crossed, and let Magnus set the pace as the kiss deepened, turning hot and graceless. His hands fisted in an effort not to grab at something. Magnus's goatee grazed Alec's lip before he found the softer curve of his jaw; Magnus nudged Alec's mouth more firmly against his neck.

So instructed, he trailed slick, toothy kisses along the side of a tendon to the collar of Magnus's henley. His chuckle gone ragged, Magnus steadied himself with a hand on Alec's chest. Up the other side, his mouth gentler this time, Alec had to waylay the next kiss in favor of drawing breath. They sat brow to brow, hands restless on one another. Alec barely dared to blink, as if the moment would sputter out of existence without his witnessing it.

"Missed you," he mumbled.

"So did I." Magnus stroked Alec's cheek, apparently just for the sake of doing it.

"Miss you?" Belatedly, Alec shifted so Magnus could settle between his knees instead of sitting angled over one leg.

Magnus groaned something that was probably rude in another language. "I did. Or I missed the way you let me be."

Alec's ribs contracted around a swell of feeling. Before he knew it he'd pulled Magnus's head down and kissed him with trembling urgency, the kind of kiss that could drag you under, and did.

"You know it's the same for me, right?" This came in a gasp against Magnus's fingers on his lip. "Like you're a safe place to be."

"Alexander," Magnus said, soft and serious, "if you keep talking, I'm going to forget every elaborate plan I had for tonight."

"Were you going to share?" Riding his own boldness as far as it'd carry him, Alec fiddled with Magnus's shirt hem.

"You only had to ask."

"Is getting you some more naked an acceptable milestone?"

Laughing, Magnus let Alec draw his shirt over his head and disentangle the cuffs of the sleeves from his rings.

"Uh, can I—?"

By way of answer, Magnus offered a cupped palm for Alec to drop the rings into, as he slid them off one finger at a time. Sometimes he liked the feel of Magnus's less pointed jewelry on his skin, the subtle textures of the metal. Now, he sucked the last newly naked finger into his mouth and sensed the shiver that went through Magnus at that. The fistful of rings clattered noisily onto the table.

"You—" Magnus's voice husked. "Are a menace."

Alec tucked his teeth lightly into the skin and dragged them up the finger joint by delicate joint, nibbled at the tip, and then found himself shoved solidly into the back of the couch. Magnus's mouth on his took a moment to become an actual kiss—Magnus heaved a couple of shallow breaths. When it did, though, it stole Alec's whole attention, a messy, delirious beat of connection. He felt it in his _toes_.

"Magnus." Groping for contact, he was derailed by Magnus's hands on his sides, under his rucked shirt. He arched forward to ease the task. As he made to shuck the shirt, Magnus bent to his bared skin, lips on his collarbone, his shoulder. A languid lick over his nipple twisted Alec's fingers into the bunched cotton. "Oh. Oh."

He'd had a notion of _going slow_ that was rapidly dissolving into sensation. One hand on the nape of Magnus's neck, a spur and a plea to continue, Alec slid the other to his belt, scrambling to find the buckle. Sex was new enough a thing that little shocks of discovery could still ambush him, but the sheer want buoyed him. Yearning was a sharp ache in his throat. The buckle came open just as Magnus bit down on his nipple to the wavering juncture point of pain and pleasure. Alec bucked up, hissing, clutching at Magnus's shoulder.

"Too much?"

"I don't know," he managed, blinking at the ceiling. "Can I want you too much?"

"That's flattering." Magnus's eyes cinched with concern. He was probably veering toward the part where he meticulously eased Alec into each new experience. That was some kind of flattering, too, but it roused an immediate dissent in Alec.

"Okay," he said, as steadily as he could, and pried Magnus's belt free the rest of the way. "Here's the thing. I want you. No qualifiers. I just—need to feel you with me." _You. Your skin and warmth and breath._ It was a thing both so immense and so specific it resisted being put into words, with a dark undertow of near, aching loss.

"That should be simple, then." As gently as he spoke—aggravatingly and wonderfully so—Magnus ran a hand down Alec's side. "You have me. No qualifiers."

Alec kissed him once for getting it, and a second time because after the moan he gave it was impossible not to. In a few tugs and twists, Magnus undid Alec's belt and enough buttons to work his jeans down by some inches, and Alec groaned through grit teeth at Magnus's light, clever fingers on his cock.

"God. I—oh, fuck, I missed you. I said that."

"I won't tire of hearing it." Magnus chuckled, more vibration than volume. Alec reached past his arm to finish what he'd started, too, with more determination than grace, but the end result was the familiar weight of Magnus's cock against his hand, followed by the realisation that their position was pretty tangled, with too many limbs in too little space.

"Scoot back?"

"Yeah." Magnus's voice had dropped to a throaty note, just in case Alec didn't feel compromised enough otherwise. "How do you—"

As soon as he had the room, Alec dropped onto his back, his head against the throw pillows piled inside the armrest. He closed a coaxing grip on Magnus's shoulder.

Magnus followed it, yielding to Alec, braced on his left arm so he didn't quite lie down. His face tensed as Alec took him in hand, his eyes falling shut, his mouth open. A slow, twisting stroke earned Alec a half-voiced murmur of assent.

"Come on," Alec said, on a dash of bravery. "I like your weight on me."

That was how they settled; Magnus's body curved to Alec's, and his hands came up to cradle Alec's face. His hips slotted in between Alec's bent legs. He kissed Alec, careful and mesmerized, and Alec wrapped his fingers around both their cocks in the narrow space between their bodies.

It didn't, all said and done, go that smoothly. They'd had better sex: neither half clothed nor tucked onto a couch that wasn't really big enough for two people fumbling for a remembered rhythm.

But Magnus kissed Alec shakily and ardently as Alec slid a sure archer's hand over him in tight, urgent glides. Half of it was just the stuttering friction of their hips, Alec's toes seeking purchase in the slippery upholstery. Every wet mark of Magnus's lips burned in him. Every bruising grip left a reminder. _You live, you're safe, I have you._

Gasping too hard to be kissed anymore, Alec held Magnus to him. Magnus brushed a tender knuckle over his mouth, eyes on his face, even as he thrust erratically into Alec's fist, the stroke of their cocks together rough and stunning and then, with Magnus's watchful gaze on Alec, too much.

The last and first thing he grasped, on either side of the punch-sharp orgasm, was Magnus above him. Still, wide-eyed, wanting.

"Alec." Something hurtfully bare rasped in Magnus's voice. "Please." He shuddered a little, with pent-up need as Alec did with the wake of his climax.

"Yeah." Alec gentled his grasp as much as he could without loosening it, fingers slick and much less steady now. A low, tattered litany of words spilled from Magnus against Alec's shoulder, his fingertips dug into Alec's collarbone. "Yeah, babe, I got you."

Magnus came arched against Alec, back taut, head buried in his chest, in a hitched, drawn-out surrender. Alec wound his arms around him and held him until he rose up enough to smile a quiet, crooked smile at Alec, and slumped back on top of him.

The rain stopped, making way for the susurrus of the city at night. Alec shifted, too content and boneless to get up, and a throw pillow thumped to the floor at his movement.

Some time later he became aware of a cat watching him. His blue tail swishing, Church padded the length of the couch along the back, then hopped down soft-pawed, out of sight. In the meanwhile, the Chairman had gone to sleep sprawled on Alec's boots.

Their pile of limbs on the couch was finally disturbed by Magnus hiking himself up on his arms. He did dip down to kiss Alec at once, warm and lingering. They were both sticky and disheveled, Alec's hair most likely an incorrigible tangle, between the rain and being squashed into the pillows.

"You're gonna make me get up, aren't you?" He muffled himself by stealing another kiss, which Magnus answered in full before moving on to his question.

"We could stay here." Magnus appeared to give this due consideration, folding his forearms over Alec's chest. He was ridiculously beautiful, Alec thought—always, yes, sometimes to the point of seeming slightly unreal, but right now, drowsily and artlessly, in a way few people saw him. "The bed has its charms, too."

Tapping a finger against Magnus's mouth, Alec traced a looping course along his neck and chest. "Am I still—you said, before, that I could come and go like I wanted." Some moment this was to feel antsy about his welcome. He trusted Magnus better than that, and yet he was trying not to take anything for granted.

"If you didn't have a standing invitation, the wards would've either zapped or stunned you the second you stepped in. I forget which it is this week."

" 'Zapped'?" Alec tried and failed to bite back a laugh. "Sounds like the scientific word for it. Should I worry about what surprises you've stuck in the Institute's wards and forgotten about?"

"If my wits are scattered, you know who's to blame." Magnus leaned into Alec's hand as he let it skim his ribs. Alec felt the swell and tug of his next breath, willfully deep. The heavy, warm mood was a sheen on layers of longing.

"Careful." His heart could still quicken at a single misty half-smile from Magnus. Good to know. "Somebody might get delusions of grandeur."

"Somebody might have a little more faith in himself." The pad of Magnus's thumb kneaded into Alec's shoulder.

Magnus probably meant it both as teasing and a sincere statement. Taking a chance on the first option, Alec laid a nibbling kiss to the juncture of his neck and shoulder, and was rewarded when Magnus misaligned a countering kiss and it landed on the side of his nose.

"Smooth."

"To be fair, you continue to be very distracting."

Slipping a foot off the couch, Alec lowered his bent knee. The movement slid Magnus's hip along his stirring cock, and Alec stifled a noise and a jerk of his own hips.

Magnus laughed, utterly uncharitable, until Alec shut him up with another kiss. This one devolved into grasping hands in his hair, Magnus's mouth straying low to the tender span of his neck, his fingers hard on Magnus's back. It came to him they were both still partway dressed.

So he went out on a limb, or a hope that didn't seem as wild anymore, and muttered against Magnus's temple, "If we're gonna go for round two, I vote for the bed."

"Motion seconded," Magnus said, with an ease that stripped the rest of Alec's hesitations.

"And," Alec said, "clothes off this time?"

"Not that I dispute the appeal of various shades of _dressed_ , but yes." Magnus got onto his feet with a fair degree of dexterity. "There's a bruise the size of your belt buckle on my leg."

"Oh. Sorry." Wriggling his toes to get the pins and needles out of his foot, Alec sat up, then looked up at Magnus. "Let me—does anybody actually _say_ 'kiss it better'? To another adult?"

"You'd be surprised." As Alec raised an arm to scoop him closer, Magnus followed the gesture, his face all dancing amusement. "And I'll survive."

Alec let himself be distracted into smoothing a hand over Magnus's half-naked hip. "You _could_ let me make it up to you." He scattered a few kisses down Magnus's ribs, drawing a rippling sound from him. "Which is to say I kind of really want to suck you off."

Okay, it was satisfying, in a way that jolted down Alec's spine in a crack of heat, to feel Magnus drag in a breath at his words. Bending, letting Alec support some of his weight, Magnus found Alec's mouth, a hazy slide of lips and tongues that lasted until it left them both gasping.

Alec stroked his thumbs along Magnus's jaw. It clenched as Magnus swallowed. The only thing separating them were their own uneven breaths, filling the forming silence. The night sat on a see-saw that seemed to dip them from laughter into longing, from contemplation into closeness without warning. He should say something.

It was Magnus with the words that prickled and teased, sparked and inflamed. All Alec had was the truth.

"I mean, it doesn't matter what we do. I just want to be good to you."

Magnus set a hand under his chin, fingertips on Alec's thrumming pulse. His expression was at once soft and slanted. "Oh, Alexander."

"Is that okay? As a starting point?"

"More than."

Alec stood up to pull him the first step toward the bedroom.

They might've fallen into the bed in near darkness if Alec hadn't knocked his hand into the light switch by accident. Between kicking off his sock and being crowded against the wall by Magnus, who'd disrobed with suspicious efficiency in the course of stumbling through the living room, Alec didn't have much mind left to pay to the lighting.

Neither, evidently, did Magnus. He left another stinging kiss high on Alec's neck, hands cupped at the base of it to keep him in place.

"Hey." It came out in a rasp. Urgency grasped for them both as they did for one another. "Magnus."

It took two more skimming kisses, on Alec's cheek and mouth, but Magnus halted, eyes gleaming and half-lidded. The desire webbing between them felt fuller this time, slow and lazy as a hot day in August.

"Mm-hm," Magnus said. His face angled subtly down. "I did promise you the bed."

Alec put his hands on his shoulders, a focal point. Shadowhunter composure was clearly way overrated, for all the use it was to him now. Magnus had a way of causing that. Especially when he tried at all.

"It's just me."

"As if any part of you were 'just' anything." Some tint of clarity crept into Magnus's expression. "That's one thing you can't ask of me, Alec. To not consider you extraordinary."

Swallowing to wet his mouth, Alec tilted his head down, then stopped before his face touched Magnus's. "I'm not asking you to. I want this to be easy. You've done so much of that for me. So, I guess—let me do this for you?"

For a few heartbeats, neither of them moved. Alec tried not to let his stomach knot, a sore shiver against the beating want. _Let me love you._ What a thing that was to ask.

There might've been a hint of flair to the arc of Magnus's arm as he wound it behind Alec's neck, but the press of his mouth on Alec's was a question and a confession.

_You're not the only one that feels vulnerable._

Alec tried, best as he could, to answer and accept it in kind.

Neither letting go nor cutting the kiss, though it turned into short slants of contact, Magnus walked him backward to the bed. They tumbled down, skin to skin, and Alec had to relish that, the wordless closeness of their bodies fumbling and fitting together.

With a deep breath to gather his wits, he twisted up onto one arm. Magnus peered at him with a glimmer, a newly lit whimsy in his eye.

Alec could've said any number of things. None of them really needed words. So he nudged Magnus over onto his back, slid wide, studying palms down his ribcage, and marked the rise of his chest in a breath with a slick, slow kiss to his sternum. Another trailed the first, as Alec painted a staggering downward path, lingering on each point. Magnus gasped, a sweet, ruinous sound, and his cock jerked against Alec's thigh.

He moved in this way a while, teasing out the places he knew would draw forth a squirm or a moan. Once or twice Magnus nearly flinched, tension cinching in his muscles without release, until Alec dipped up to kiss his face, aimless, soothing, mixed with a muttered _hey, easy_ or _don't hold back_.

Shuffling lower, Alec ducked to Magnus's hip, lips dwelling on what could've been the growing shadow of a bruise. If it was, Magnus only gave a pleasured hum in response. His fingers shifted to the skin of Magnus's inner thigh, arrow calluses nearly rough against it.

Alec lifted his mouth away as Magnus threw his head back, the arch of his throat sharp and exposed. The sound he made, ragged and devoid of words, set off an ache in Alec's chest.

Could you love another person so it filled every corner of your being, every shadowed place in your soul? Alec watched Magnus's hand, the one not clenched on a fistful of the covers, grope downward, and stupid, breathless adoration seized him.

He closed the grip. Magnus curled his fingers in between Alec's with shuddering purpose.

There was probably more of an art to this: some arcane roadmap to showing someone what they meant to you, to etching it in their skin with measured, knowing touches. Magnus would've known, but Magnus was gasping something that sounded like Alec's name, and his knees shook against Alec's ribs.

Leaving his left hand in Magnus's, Alec palmed the curve of his cock. He drew a pliant lip up to the head and closed his mouth around it.

Magnus went still, muscles trembling with the effort. Alec repeated the motion, the tip of his tongue up along the length, then the gentle, ghosting pressure of his lips, and Magnus hissed through his teeth, straining not to buck into the contact. His clasp of Alec's hand slackened and tightened again.

"You can move, you know," Alec murmured, though he was apparently not above punctuating this by another sucking kiss to the tip, tasting salt as Magnus's cock twitched against his tongue.

"Oh, that's—oh, Alec, your _mouth_." Compared to Magnus's characteristic talkative streak in bed, this seemed brief, but Alec felt it like a jab in the ribs. Swallowing hard, he bent back down. Here, at least, was something he wanted to learn: Magnus, his body, and all the intricacies of his pleasure that Alec hadn't yet mapped.

He stroked his loosely curled fingers along Magnus's cock as Magnus, his grit or patience crumbling, rose into the grip of his hand in unsteady thrusts. Alec nuzzled the hollow of his hip and tried to keep his own discipline from utterly collapsing. Magnus was, on the whole, some kind of unfair: he didn't even have to be _doing_ anything to Alec to make him lose his head.

Well. He was doing plenty. His left hand carded back through Alec's messy hair, brushed the shell of his ear, twisted a strand around a finger.

"Want me to move on?" More gently this time. If Alec's endurance ebbed, Magnus might be nearing a limit, too.

"Just to feel you." Magnus's thumb swept a trickle of sweat from Alec's brow. "At your pace." A huff of laughter followed that.

_I am_ , Alec thought with a jot of ferocity, _going to make you come before me if it's the last thing I do._

With a skewed kiss to Magnus's knuckles, Alec reclaimed his hand so he could grip Magnus's hip securely, and steadfastly ignored the fact that his own cock ached for touch. He took Magnus's shaft in his mouth, firmer this time, the first curling swipe of his tongue goading a string of bitten-off, euphoric nonsense from Magnus.

He let himself fall into a tempo, jolting it here and there by sucking hard on the crown or by pressing cautious, maddening fingers in between Magnus's legs, skimming the sensitive skin there. Magnus's hand stayed in his hair, restive but undemanding. Now and then his fingers tugged as Alec found a particular spot or slant to push him higher.

Gasping, he lingered to circle the tip with deep, wet pulls of his lips, without much rhyme. Magnus shivered.

"Alec, Alec, _there_ , oh, if you knew how that feels."

A laugh welled up in his chest, and he had to withdraw to let it out. "Tell me."

Magnus groaned a feeble protest, whether for the lack of Alec's mouth or at the request, but obliged, with the grasp of his fingers that was as much a caress as a prompt, with the way he finally surged against Alec, turning their stammering pace into snapping, blissful glides that would throb in Alec's jaw later. He didn't care. He let Magnus take this, the crest of his slow-built pleasure, without reserve. Even—especially— when it meant feeling him come apart against Alec's body, knees raised tight, his hand a brief vise on the back of Alec's neck.

Alec clung to his diminishing focus and waited, head laid on Magnus's shoulder.

After a stretch of quiet, just their breaths in the airy space, Magnus rolled half onto his side and kissed Alec's temple. "I suppose I ended up showing you."

"Same difference," Alec said, too hoarse. Another small epiphany: he _really_ liked making Magnus feel good. It sang under his skin in a note both strange and immediately knowable.

He swayed a bit when Magnus brushed his cock, heavy with need, leaping at the mellow invitation of Magnus's fingers.

"A little help, perhaps?" He could hear the glint in Magnus's eyes.

A faintly callused fingertip circled the crown of his cock. It stirred with a few sticky drops of wetness, and Alec had to bow his head into Magnus's neck again, panting through a dry mouth. " _Magnus_."

Magnus smoothed his other hand through Alec's hair, aching and unhelpful. "Go on."

"Magnus. God. Just want your hand. Please."

He'd gone a step past the edge where pleasure began to warp in on itself, verging on too raw. Magnus coaxed him back, stroke by smooth steady stroke, and let Alec wrap a shaky arm around him and probably leave new bruises in the shape of his fingertips on his back.

It lasted for—ten strokes, twenty, thirty, he did not know. Sensation overtook him in the middle of it, carrying him to a bright, shivering peak and then down in long, coasting slides. Magnus put his lips on Alec's brow and spoke against his skin, hushed, reverent words that signified little and said everything.

Alec turned over onto his back, limbs wonderfully loose, and let himself just be. Magnus's breathing beside him seemed, for a moment, the only sound he ever wanted to hear.

That never worked for very long. But it made for a good handful of minutes, both of them still and sated, lying shoulder to shoulder.

"Hey," he said in the end. "What happened to those elaborate plans you had?"

" _You_ happened," Magnus said, arch and amused. "I haven't forgotten about them, if you're not too busy saving New York tomorrow."

Alec thought, grudgingly, about his morning schedule, then mentally shunted everything into the afternoon. Maybe the day after. "Don't you mean if _we_ aren't?"

Magnus linked his fingers through Alec's, sinking closer to his side. "That sounds quite right."

It did.

_end_

**Author's Note:**

> I owe thanks to my long-suffering crew of enablers, who were particularly precious this time:
> 
> Katie, for picking through my ESL foibles and regularly being on fire about the draft;  
> Riss, for always believing in me;  
> Mary; for extremely timely kindness;  
> S, for letting me rant ("I've written _bondage_ , why is this _blowjob_ so problematic?!") and, you know, for dragging me over here in the first place (♥);  
>  and Joan, for letting me drag her over here with her usual great grace.


End file.
